Illegal drugs and dodgy pics? Nah. Half the dark web is perfectly legal Despite its reputation, less than half of the sites on the dark web are illegal, according to a new study by security intelligence outfit Intelliagg. On the 48 per cent of the dark web which crosses the line, the unlawful content is mostly related to financial crime rather than drugs or sexual perversion, contrary to tabloid …
It never was. It's just an alternate network. In fact this quote from the article:
"websites are hard to find, unless you’re in the know, and sites on the dark web cannot be reached without the use of specialized software."
is complete bullshit. Just download the Tor Browser and you're on. While you're there you can download Darwin's Origin of Species, the Bible, Koran, or other controversial classics from one of my sites here http://ibgk7stvp6bov6x6.onion Of course all these onion sites can be reached from the clearnet as well and you'll find them on Google too. This darknet nonsense has got to be the joke of the century.
PS: The Tor Browser is just a recent version of Firefox with the Tor protocol built in. Also, to reach onion sites, you can just append .to on the end of the address. There are other suffixes which work sometimes like .nu. But why not just do a search here https://ahmia.fi/.
". . . 0.1% of the entire dark web or 0.2% of the legal dark web. Check you out."
Thanks. Actually, I don't think it is so easy to measure how many there are. One thing about .onion sites though is that they are dead easy to set up and can be hosted anywhere because they don't need an IP and so NAT is no issue. There's no need to get/buy an IP or domain name. It's very convenient - and they're certainly not "illegal".
Actually, I should have mentioned above that Tor Browser is not only Firefox with Tor, but it looks and works much like Firefox for your daily browsing.
Tor Browser is "specialized software", sure, but so is Firefox... It's just kind of a dumb claim. They're trying to make it sound mysterious without really saying anything. And yes, I would imagine onion.to has blacklisted any super illegal sites they are aware of, though I'm not dumb enough to go poking around to find out for sure.
"Hmm. If I move to the dark side could I expect a lot less spam?"
I don't know, but you could expect a lot more cookies.
I don't know if this is formally defined, but I've seen this clarified as "deep web" vs "dark web". "Deep web" is content inaccessible to search engines - ie intranets, content and servers blocked by security policy/systems, and (I suppose) private address space like 10.x.x.x.
"Dark web", on the other hand, is content that requires specific software to reach it - TOR, I2P (Invisible Internet Project), etc. These are actively hidden from normal use and require unusual clients to reach; dodgy stuff naturally migrates here, but I've also seen it used for free speech purposes. The latter (avoiding censorship) is the subject of my current MSc project, and was one of the original ideas behind TOR when it was developed and released by the US Navy.
I'd go a step further and point out that the "Dark Web" uses heavy duty end-to-end encryption and some method* of location masking to ensure anonymity, where as the "Deep Web" is basically just a part of the World Wide Web that you can't get to without knowing the address and/or being on the correct side of a firewall.
*I say some method because I believe over time the methods in use now will be replaced. Location masking is vital to anonymity and the Alphabet Soups can currently break through the current methods. It's just a matter of time before someone comes up with a better one.
The deep web also includes things that search engines just can't make sense out of, such as databases. The search engine may be able to see the database just fine, but can't get any data out of it directly, because it isn't stored as web pages.. A user has to go to the database's custom search/query engine to actually access the data--which will dynamically generate web pages in the process.
It depends what you call the "dark web".
Do they just mean .onion sites, or do they include sites that don't have a DNS lookup, or which serve on non-standard ports?
There must be thousands, if not millions of the latter.
Lots of companies, ours included, have web sites and services accessible on the internet which are for company use, and don't appear in DNS or use standard ports, or only accept connections from certain IP ranges. Are these all counted as the dark web?
EDIT: JimC got in before me :)
I love this bit:
A spokesman from Intelliagg explained: “The dark web is renowned for illicit and illegal trade, unmonitored and anonymous. Not any more. We have successfully penetrated into the darkest parts using specialist software and our expertise.
Yeah, so they know how to use a TOR browser and a port scanner... whoop-de-doo...
This is marketing by two companies aimed at the corporate world. And not at their IT departments. So yes, compared to, say, the Internet Explorer* it is specialist software, and expertise is required to run it. At least that's what will be on the invoice.
* AKA "The Internet". As in the old helldesk chestnut "Waah! I've accidentally deletet the internet! What do I do now?!?"
Anyone without free speech would find the dark web very useful, as would anyone with an interest not considered socially acceptable but not necessarily illegal. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than a few Ashley Madison style dating sites in there and I'd be downright shocked if there weren't a few sites where LGBT folks gather to chat away from the prying eyes of straight cisgendered folk and the bigots that walk among them. Other examples might be a Chinese anti-communist site, an anti-Islam site based basically anywhere in the Middle East except Israel (or an anti-terrorist pro-Islam site run by someone living in a Daesh controlled area for that matter), a site talking about how terrible Best Buy is run by a member of the Geek Squad...Basically, use your imagination and come up with reasons people might want to have a site that couldn't be traced back to them.
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